


Deploy, Sterilize, Secure

by SomethingWalrusComesThisWay



Category: Half-Life, Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Apocalypse, Dehuminization, Dubious Morality, Dystopia, Gen, Love, Optimism, POV Alternating, Torture, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-29
Updated: 2013-08-29
Packaged: 2017-12-25 00:05:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/946306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SomethingWalrusComesThisWay/pseuds/SomethingWalrusComesThisWay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>En-route to conquer humanity, the Battleship Condescension and it's accompanying armada make first contact with a race quite like their own. The Condesce looks into the abyss of multiversal conflict and the abyss stares the fuck back, eventually involving humanity, carapacian, vortigaunt, the race-x, and untold legions more species caught up in the blizzard of interdimensional war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Deploy, Sterilize, Secure

She sat alone in a dark monochrome room half filled with useless appraisers and nutrient fluid up to the knees. Her subjects all wore black water-proof robes and sipped flasks of sopor, grub-liquor, or simply pasteurized blood. She felt the ebb and flow of Her Helmsman screaming in pain a deck below, and even sensed his rapid calculations and data outputs. All was well. Within the solar sweep, Her glorious war would reach an unnamed backwater world filled with dirty water and boring dull green things, dwelt on only by somewhat advanced primates used to arguing amongst themselves. She thought they might be a threat except for the infighting part, but Her best tactical analysts thought not.

Suddenly something changed. She could sense the agony of the Helmsman below intensify ten fold as he worked in... new information? Surely that shit wasn't right. The course between home and the mudball they were en-route to was strictly linear, almost as if it had been designed for linear travel. Past the Medium, there were absolutely no spacial anomalies in the area whatsoever. So for the Helmsman to writhe and lash out during standard calculation meant that there was something in the way.

A grubby little greenblood pissant, good for nothing but papping some morail of hers and being made into a glass of herbal green tea nervously trotted up to Her, trying to show her Empress an heir of courage and humbleness and terror all at the same time. She attempted to state the obvious.

"Ma- ma'am... analysis indicates a rapidly expanding spacial ano-"

For telling Her Imperious Condescension what she already knew, the punishment would generally be to have your face torn off by Her trident in front of your lusus, moirail, matesprite, and-slash-or kismisis, but rapidly expanding spacial anomalies meant that She had to get Her ass down to the War Room, so She grabbed the little idiot girl by the horns, gave a quick snap, and went about her important business, trident the cleaner for it.

The little green shit eater was still writhing on the ground, not quite dead, but she would drown all the same in the nutritional bath the Condescension ate, bathed, schemed, fucked, killed, tortured, and slept in, and soon be devoured by the ship's engines for a little extra free kick. Fuel costs were down, life was cheap.

But the little sob story come-uppity lowblood had been telling the truth, that shit was a hole in nothin' getting bigger every minute. A techie handed Her a grubtop monitor displaying a bright blue portal in the middle of the damn path forming a few trillion miles ahead, and the current lightspeed they'd damn near slam right into it or even through it. She turned away to see who else' head She could snap for not making a fucking course correction already, spotted a blue-blood with a Bridge Command emblem and...

The lights went out. The chattering stopped. The bulgelicking air conditioning stopped. Perhaps most disturbingly the Helmsman's writhing and shrieking faded almost immediately into a dull whimpering as he finished calculating what must have been a few quadrillion something or others worth of static information from the other side of the portal. The monitors winked back on with a small expulsion of their hosts blood, one of them spraying dull indigo on Her torso. They were displaying mafuckin' glyphs. What other species within the region had language and teleportation? Shit, even Her people didn't understand that magyyk crap, the best they'd come up with had accidentally spawned some wretched cross between a howlbeast and a carapaced bug monster, with WINGS to boot, who'd lost his mind and stolen some poor sucker's sword and seppuku'd all over the damn laboratory. Teleportation was neither ordinary, simple, or coincidental.

The cryptogore team had a fix on the glyphs within seconds, and She snatched the hot-off-the-press codec out of a bewildered blue-blood cryptogore's fingers.

"Hey ocean spray wonder. The fuck does this mean?"

"I... We aren't... sure?"

The trident was already in the air when another such cryptogore spoke up, saving the terrified little dweeb's life.

"We believe it's an order my Condescension!"

"Or- FUCKIN' ORDERS? Who the hell be tellin' us what to do?"

"The... Umm... I believe this says the 'Universal Union?' But there are also references to 'benefactors' and..."

The talkative little guy must have noticed her knuckles growing increasingly fuchsia pink around the ornately worked golden trident renowned for moving at speeds almost as fast as sound.

"The Combine! We're 99% sure they're called the 'Combine' and they tunnel from universes using some really antiquated string based model! It's not a nearly efficient enough method to work in-universe, so we can out-jump them if we have to. But they're barking orders, this one says... 'Unidentified persons of interest, confirm your civil status with local protection team immediately'.

The little guy, pants almost assuredly slightly more funked than had been earlier in the evening, slapped at the nearest grub tower's keyboard and the glyphs translated into good ol' Alternian, albeit the draconian midblood dialect associated with law and government rather than Her own preferred seadweller's common speak, so much classier and well kept.

"Priority identification check in progress. Please, assemble in your designated inspection positions." The monitors flashed this doublespeak for 'give us a name or we're going to blow you out of the sky' for a few minutes until finally everything stopped and a disgusting creature vaguely resembling a morbidly obese pale white grub with advanced cybernetic implants in place of facial features flashed on the screen. Her head ached, but all she had to do was wipe away a bead of sweat. The blueblood cryptogore infront of Her was kneeling on the floor was wiping blood from his nostril and tears from his eyes, and several of the attendant lowblood slaves were dead, covered in blood. One bottom barrel brown-blood's head had even exploded. She felt Her ship pitch and yaw ever so slightly as the Helmsman, whose blood was piss- yellow, tossed and turned. He recovered quickly and made a few unconscious course corrections again however, having built up somewhat of a resistance to psychic torture.

Finally, the blue tunnel thing stopped being a vague blur of spacial illogic and started looking a hell of a lot like the hull of a massive starship. And then synthetic infantry fighters. And then more fighters. And then small bursts of EMP and energy projectiles coming from... everywhere it looked like. The EMP was going to do fuckall against Her beautiful organic ultra-advanced Battleship Condescension, but those weird ass pulses of dark energy were going to wreck them all new nooks. And they were still waitin' fo' the damn Helmsman to turn his self's brain on!

"Target the mofos. Target them lil' synths. Target all of tha-- SOMEBODY FUCKIN' FIRE!"

The enemy attempted to broadcast their hideously alien messages of freakish calm and subservience again, but the whole of the Battleship Condescension had raised security, and the highly adept psionics not working the engines and keeping the Helmsman in line were devoting their mental will to fending off the invading attack. Still, some of their purposeful antagonism slipped through the cracks. Now She was hearing it in Her head.

Deploy... Sterilize... Secure...

The Imperious Condescension, Empress of the Alternian Empire, who had forcefully unified Her entire galaxy with Her war lust to abate the insane whims of Her god-lusus Gl'Bgolyb the Emissary, would dare not stoop to dimension hopping psychic fucks like these. As She made arrangements for the ship to make the jump to lightspeed (Fool. Put it in top gear we got to book it), She made a mental note: Appeal to the Parlaimentation for a massive increase in teleportation funding as well as psychic weapons research. Torture dissenters until death, then torture their lovers and erase their would-be genetic offspring from the Order of the Auxilliatrix fluid vaults. The ol' Dolorosa Shuffle. The Combine Empire or the Universal Union or the Benefactors of the Many or whatever they dubbed themselves would soon see that Meenah Peixes and Her subjects did not bow to overgrown gene-splicing abominations with an amateur interpretation of metaphysics and quantum light show portal technology.

These fools had officially entered Alternian territory, akin to treading on molecule thin ice over a lake full of creatures that knew only hatred and fear under twin pink and green satellites, used to soaking their home in all colors of the rainbow in mad feeding frenzies and violent mating seasons in which not everyone came back alive and the produced offspring only barely compensated the decrease in population.

At last, at long last, She felt the slight tingle of fear not sensed since she was just a child, swimming in deep waters she could not hope to completely explore, her mane behind her. Sometimes she would swim out to far, away from Momma, and she would feel Momma's tendrils begin to prod and poke at her tangled hair. Many millenia ago she had wanted to explore the reef with Cronos, who had said they could hunt bunna-da together. She'd been so intent on backing him into a corner and stealing a long stupid playful kiss from him. One thing had lead to another and the two had come damn close to being slaughtered by Asuhgh pirates. Her blood was one in a million, no, one in a hundred billion. Some would have given their horns to drink the blood of a would have been empress, and undoubtedly if word got out that they had purchased the flesh and blood of a fuchsia seadweller, Imperial drones would be on them within a matter of weeks. To some, it was worth it. Regardless, her death until she became Her was a very real possibility. Of course, all this meant was that the previous Empress' spermatozoa would be taken out of the Order's vaults and given to a Matriarch grub, but Momma would not bear that possibility. Momma had kicked and writhed and screamed and finally torn the boat apart with her whisper, destroying Meenah's ears (a very costly surgery) and almost destroyed Cronos' mind. Certainly many in the nearby city of Lud had suffered comas and intense daymares.

It was this memory that came to mind when that same fear trickled through her. The fear of facing an opponent (but Momma loved her) unknowable and unbeatable. An opponent who entered universes with gung-ho surety, as if there was no need to assess the situation first. An opponent that entered reality in the center of a faster-than-light flightpath and somehow negated decelerating heavily armed warships smashing against it's hulls. An opponent who gave orders in unnerving glyphs and screamed its clinical and detached warnings, almost bureaucratized, at any passing thing it did not recognize, as if it knew it could force creatures from another plane of existence to fit its definitions and methods.

She steeled Herself. A war was upon them both.

**Author's Note:**

> Quite likely this will not update frequently if at all, but if I can warm up to doing more creative writing I'll definitely work on more. At LEAST a couple more chapters hopefully.


End file.
